hackaday.com Archives - 04 March 2013, Monday

This wooden box is a wireless pinball controller and tablet stand . The idea is to set it on a workbench to give you some of the thrill of standing and playing the real thing. [Jeff] has been rather addicted to playing a pinball app on Android lately, and started the journey because h...

Why should cyclists have all of the fancy toys? Bicycle computers are very common these days but you won’t find similar hardware for skateboards and longboards. [KobraX22] isn’t taking it lying down. He built this speed and distance computer for his longboard . It doesn’t use very man...

What if we told you we had a computer you can take with you? What if it only weighed 28 pounds? This is a pretty hard sell when today you can get a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor packing computer to carry in your pocket which weighs less than 5 ounces. But back in the day the Donner 3500...

[Chris Thorpe] is a model railroading aficionado, and from his earliest memories he was infatuated with the narrow gauge locomotives that plied their odd steel tracks in northern Wales. Of course [Chris] went on to create model railroads, but kit manufacturers such as Airfix and Hornb...

When we first heard of the Raspberry Pi we were elated that projects that once required a full-blown computer could now be done on a tiny, and cheap board running Linux. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much in the way of using computer vision algorithms on the Raspi, but thanks to [Len...

Spring is almost here and with that the green thumbs out there are preparing for their summer gardens. It’s usually a good idea to get a jump on all your gardening activities by starting seeds indoors, but with this comes the problem of making sure juvenile plants get enough sunlight....

I hate when people refer to the lightbulb conspiracy. Because there’s two sides to the story. The other side is, that tungsten filament lightbulbs last longer at the expense of energy efficiency and brightness, so companies that boasted longer life bulbs did it by cheating elsewhere –...

Download a song from iTunes, and you can only add that song to the music library of five other computers. Grab a copy of the latest Microsoft Office, and you’d better hope you won’t be upgrading your computer any time soon. Obviously DRM is a great tool for companies to make sure we o...

For the Deconstruction decentralized hackathon, “The FABricators” from Fab Lab Tulsa built a Street Art Bot . The robot drives around and dispenses liquid chalk in a pattern to make sidewalk art. The FABricators’ robot is based on an electric wheelchair platform. Attached to the base ...

Ironically, a lot of the nicer dance pads (hard mats) are actually built for multiple systems with breakout ports (DB-9′s, usually) that just short pins to a common ground when a panel is stepped on; they’re made this way so that you can buy a small box that will adapt it to a differe...

Want to run your 3D printer without your laptop attached? Looking to make your hackerspace printer network accessable? OctoPrint aims to make a 3D print server for the Raspberry Pi. The open source Python project allows you to upload and manage GCODE files on the RPi. You can then sel...

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The solution for “remote” triggering is that black cable which physically attaches to the shutter button. Just depress the plunger at the opposite end and a picture will be snapped. This process is automated with the use of a hobby servo hidden inside the box. It’s driven by an Arduin...

If you find yourself in the West suburbs of Chicago, IL with nothing to do you should head over to Workshop 88 . [Andrew Morrison] shot some video at the last public meeting which includes a tour of the facilities. We’ve embedded it after the jump for your convenience. The clip isn’t ...

The problem with laser etching dark materials is that the areas burnt away by the intense light don’t really stand out from the rest of the surface. [The 5th Fool] is taking a roundabout way of correcting this by topping his laser engravings with contrasting paint . The technique is s...

[James Glanville] wrote in to show of his latest tube project. It’s a clock using six IV-3 VFD tubes . In addition to the tube displays the project prominently features a blue 3D printed case which hides away all the guts of the build including the Stellaris Launchpad which drives the...

Inspired by playing The Legend of Zelda video game series, Cornell University students [Mohamed Abdellatif] and [Michael Ross] created a Virtual Archery game as their ECE 4760 Final Project . The game consists of a bow equipped with virtual arrows and a target placed about 20 ft away....

This is 100% true. I can’t be completely sure that this is what caused the problems (personally, I think the fact that he used polish remover instead of pure acetone is probably the real problem) but I can vouch for the accuracy of this comment. My previous jobs was working for a majo...

So you’ve got a project running on an x86 board and you’d like some GPIO pins. Whether you want to read a few buttons, light up a few LEDs, put an accelerometer in your computer or whatever, you’ve got a problem. Luckily there’s an easy way to get 24 GPIO pins on an x86 board using a ...

The screen is an eGalaxy 7″ touch sensitive module he picked up on eBay. It sounds like it was meant for a backup camera in the dashboard of a car. He compiled his own Linux kernel to add support for the screen. It uses HDMI for the video interface with the driver board, and the touch...

CrashBangLabs in Regina recently got their hands on a laser cutter. The Full Spectrum cutter was donated by a local company, who were upgrading to a larger machine. With no laser cutting experience, [Brett] decided that his first project would be laser engraving his iPhone 5 . This is...

It should come as no surprise the Hackaday tip line is regularly flooded with press releases. Everything from an infographic comparing Call of Duty 3 to Battlefield 3 (yes, totally serious), announcements that a company we’ve never heard of is getting a new CFO, to the business propos...

Over the last few months, we’ve seen our fair share of pentesting appliances. Whether they’re in the form of a Raspberry Pi with a custom distro, or an innocuous looking Internet-connected wall wart, they’re all great tools for investigating potential security vulnerabilites at home, ...

We’ve seen a few of the projects from The Deconstruction, a 48-hour build-a-thon for hackerspaces and other groups around the globe. Of course Tymkrs, a pair of geeky vloggers famous for their building prowess, were part of The Deconstruction, and in the process they came up with a fe...

For as much as we enjoy rockets, explosives, and other dangerous things, we haven’t said a word about the works of [Richard Nakka] . He’s the original hacker rocketeer with thousands of words dedicated to the craft of making things move straight up really fast. One of his more interes...

Take a look at the image above to see his alterations to the mainboard. The jumpers soldered to the two chips at the top are by far the trickiest part of the project. Each of the pins he soldered to needed to first be lifted from the PCB pad so that they no longer make contact with th...

Look, we understand the need to find a project to occupy your time and interest. So we’re not going to ask the wrong question (why?) for this one. This guy hates the creme that connects the chocolate cookies to make an Oreo. So he built a complicated system to separate the cookies and...

One of the issues with extruder-based 3D printing is that it can be very difficult to print objects that have voids in them. You simply must have something to deposit the soft material on until it has a chance to harden. [Matt] found a solution which should work for any extruder-based...

Here’s an interesting hack. It’s a small pick-up truck with a Dope Cannon attached to it . Sure, it looks more like something you’d see in Syria , but this item was actually seized in Mexico where it was being used to fire 30 pound slugs of Marijuana over the border fence with the US....

Here’s a camera rig that makes it a snap to produce photorealistic 3D models of an object. It was put together rather inexpensively by an indie game company called Skull Theatre. They published a couple of posts which show off how the rig was built and how it’s used to capture the mod...

Well here in the States we have the same thing, call them cattle guards, why they became to be call that I don’t know. I’m not that sure you would want to use two cattle guards here. They get in a hurry one might get jostled into a cattle guard, and break a leg. Aldo some use swing ga...